Monday, April 14
I haven’t even closed the front door behind me when I hear my husband gasp.
“What happened?!”
“Look!” He points at his phone. “We just talked about needing to buy a bed frame, and our friend is selling hers with the mattress included. Let’s buy it!”
I’m usually not one to approve of an impulse purchase, but he’s right. We’ve been sleeping on an old mattress on the floor for over a year. It’s about time we invested in a real bed, and we’ll be helping out a friend at the same time.
“Sure,” I tell him. “Let’s do it.”
The next day, we go to our friend’s apartment to see the bed. She insists we lie on it to get a good feel for it before agreeing to the sale. But from the second my weight sinks into the mattress, I can already tell this is going to be a huge upgrade. The only catch is that we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks before we take it because she’ll still be using it until the day she moves.
I’ve never felt more back, leg, and neck pain than during those two weeks. Every morning when I wake up, I feel a stiffness or soreness I’ve never noticed before; and every night when I go to bed, the creaks get louder and the springs get springier. When my husband twists and turns by my side, I feel like I’m trying to sleep on a trampoline, his every movement catapulting me higher and higher into the air.
Every time my head hits the pillow, all I can think about is the new bed.
After a few nights of this growing discontentment, I start to think about our new bed in terms of the Kingdom of God.
I realize that when I didn’t have hope for anything different, my old mattress was just fine. I knew it had its quirks, but I found it easy enough to ignore them and go to sleep. But the second I knew the new one was coming, and even touched it and experienced it for myself, the old mattress was never the same. I knew there was more, and I couldn’t go back.
Once we understand that something greater is on its way, and once we experience it in the way Mary does in today’s Gospel reading, we can’t help but see everything else differently. We grow dissatisfied with the status quo. We feel the emptiness in what we once believed would fill us. We discover that the fame or praise or power we were so content to pour our life out chasing, will never satisfy us.
This Holy Week, let us embrace the chasm between what is and what ought to be—what we see now and what is to come. Let us be present with our heart’s hunger like never before. May our awareness of the Kingdom that will have no end affect the way we accompany Jesus at the cross, and may it forever change our perception of all the world has to offer.
